At our Under 30 summit in Philadelphia this fall, Rakim “A$AP Rocky” Mayers was among the last to arrive at our group cover shoot.

“Sorry,” he said with a grin, decked out in a full-length Dior coat. “I’m fashionably late.”

Indeed, nobody in the hip-hop world has been more fashionable of late. The Harlem-born mixtape maven grew up shuttling between homeless shelters, swaggering into mainstream consciousness with debut album Long.Live.A$AP, which reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts in 2013, helping him earn an estimated $5 million that year.

But it’s his fashion sense–modeling for DKNY and creating a capsule collection for Guess–that makes him ascendant. Rocky is focused on his creative collective, AWGE, which does everything from designing album artwork to managing stylists.

“To be able to curate and manage my own business,” he says, “I always wanted to do it.”